Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we examine the celebrity couples who give us hope for our own romantic futures as we try to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
There may appear to be something slightly dissonant about idolizing someone’s third marriage, but hear me out. We’ve already established that divorce is good, actually, and although Paul McCartney’s prior marriages—to Linda McCartney (a.k.a. Stella McCartney’s mother) and Heather Mills—both had sad ends, I truly believe that the onetime Beatle, who turned 84 on June 18, has found his match with his wife of 15 years, Nancy Shevell.
For all the true-love inspiration in more au courant couples like newlyweds Dua Lipa and Callum Turner, consider this: McCartney and Shevell wed at London’s Old Marylebone Town Hall in 2011, just as Lipa and Turner would 15 years later. For the occasion, Shevell wore an ivory dress designed by her stepdaughter—and although her reference was Wallis Simpson’s 1937 wedding outfit, while Lipa took a page out of Bianca Jagger’s bridal book with a Schiaparelli skirt suit, there’s some pretty clear connective tissue between the two musical-royalty nuptials.
McCartney and Shevell, a New York-based businesswoman, first met in 2007, while staying at their respective Hamptons homes. (It’s giving Nancy Meyers movie that I would see a humiliating number of times!) And, despite their 17-year age gap (which we’ve also decisively concluded isn’t that big a deal, depending, of course, on the age and maturity level of the younger person), they hit it off right away, traveling to Antigua once McCartney’s divorce from Mills was finalized and even road-tripping through America. Take it from me, someone who has done numerous cross-country road trips: if you find someone you can stand even when there’s inexplicable traffic and the sun has long set and the entirety of the car smells like someone’s spilled coffee from three days ago, marry them ASAP.
McCartney and Shevell haven’t talked much publicly about their marriage, and honestly, I kind of respect that; what Shevell has shared on the topic is simple and to the point. Once asked by The Times of London if she found “McCartney’s fame stressful,” she replied: “I’m a cancer survivor, I run a trucking company, and I’ve got a 16-year-old to raise. That’s stress.”
When I think about the fact that Ringo Starr was in attendance at McCartney’s wedding to Shevell—not to mention the fact that McCartney toasted John Lennon on what would have been his 71st birthday!—I come as embarrassingly close to crying as anyone else who grew up being lulled to sleep with “I Will” and torrented the entirety of The White Album in high school. God help me, I just want McCartney to be happy, and I’m so glad he seems to have attained that goal!
